Steve Ballmer: Microsoft Tech•Ed 2005

STEVE BALLMER: I noticed you guys running out of a little pep on a few of those, “Yes, Miss Bee.” I was carefully doing an audience poll, listening backstage, to make sure I really understood where the pain points were, and thanks to PowerPoint, we fixed them all in my presentation in the last 35 seconds. (Laughter.)

It is a real joy and pleasure for me to have a chance to be here and kick off this Tech•Ed 2005. In a sense, I feel like each year over the last three or four years I felt more energy, more enthusiasm, more excitement, not only in this conference but really amongst people in the IT industry broadly around the world. We got through the dot-com bubble, we got though the bust and I think we’re really in what I would call a period of very long-term, sustained and positive growth for our industry.

We got signed up for this conference faster than we ever have, six weeks, full sign-up, over 11,000 people here today, and that just shows you some of the kind of enthusiasm that exists out there today and hunger for knowledge and information that’s going to allow IT people and developers to do a better and better job of really empowering the businesses that they serve.

Now, people say, what’s the future look like, are you excited, what’s going on. I think the excitement of seeing all these people in a sense speaks for itself but I’ll speak for me. I don’t think there has ever been a better, more exciting, more interesting time to be in the IT industry than right now. I don’t think anybody in this room should feel like there was any career choice you could have made that was any better than the choice you did make, to be in the information technology industry. The rate of innovation and change, the impact we all get to have on the world over the next ten years I guarantee you will be even bigger than the impact the IT industry had over the last ten years.

That’s a big statement. This is an important year for Microsoft, you could say; it’s the 10-year anniversary of Windows 95. Windows 95 for us, at least to that point in time, was the event that had the most palpable energy and excitement in it of anything that we had done. And a lot’s happened in that10 years: PCs really boomed up, cell phones, Internet; it all kind of exploded in this last ten-year period of time.

And yet with the kinds of innovations that we see coming from XML, coming from natural language, coming from mobility, coming from digital entertainment, the next ten years really will be even more exciting and create even more opportunity for everybody in the room.

We all know there are challenges. The theme for my speech today is enabling people to drive business success. Your mission, your tasks are to enable the folks who work for the businesses that you serve to do a better job, to make better decisions, to engage in what we would refer to as the New World of Work.

The New World of Work

I want to talk a little bit about this New World of Work, but our job at Microsoft is not only to facilitate all of these end users that you serve to work in new and better ways, our mission is to also give you, developers and IT people, the tools that you need so that you can drive business success, and most of my talk today will be about that.

Bill Gates in a speech that he gave to about 125 CEOs from around the world last month talked about this concept of the New World of Work. What is the New World of Work? It’s a world in which the information worker, the employee in each of the companies that you serve is at the center. They’re trying to improve customer interaction, they’re trying to help optimize supply chain, they’re trying to find the right information to make the right decisions on behalf of their businesses. They’re trying to get the right insights so that they see patterns that are going to help them systematically improve business performance. They’re going to engage in various business processes from human resources and budgeting and planning to supply chain and distribution, manufacturing, trading, you name it. They’re going to need tools to help them communicate and collaborate with others and they’re going to need tools that help them personally improve their productivity.

Each and every one of these opportunities implies work for people in information technology and each and every one of these scenarios and opportunities is still very much unfulfilled today. I can take any one of them and we all can feel the pain of the users that we serve. How many times, ask yourself this question, how many times has somebody come to you from the user community and said, “I know the information I want is someplace in our computer system; why can’t I find it, why can’t I get access to it, why is it so hard?”

Well, we know there are pain points out there. People come and say, “I’m trying to quickly collaborate with some folks in two other companies that we’re working with on a bid for a major new project; why isn’t it easy to just throw a Web site up there that all of us across the three companies can share?” You all know why that is not easy and we all know why that’s not easy today, but that’s a pain point that’s felt by these information workers.

So if we at Microsoft and all of you are really going to do our job, we have to pick up the mantle of allowing the employees in the businesses that we serve to really engage in this New World of Work. We have to as Microsoft provide you with the tools so that you can be successful enabling this new way, this new style of work.

I think before we dive into that, we’re going to take a chance to learn a little bit more about some of this and maybe we’ll start with a little report from Samantha Bee.

VOICEOVER GUY: And now partway through Steve Ballmer’s keynote, here is a Tech•Ed show special editorial from our senior analyst for irritating IT industry trends, Samantha Bee.

SAMANTHA BEE: Thanks, voiceover guy.

VOICEOVER GUY: You’re welcome!

SAMANTHA BEE: All right. I am coming to you live from the heartland of the business world to address the one thing currently annoying you most. No, it’s not the second Tuesday of every month when you receive the latest Microsoft security download. I’m referring to requests from that unique species of internal client that you all have to serve. For in the zoo of world commerce, the cages are now open; thanks to wireless, actual work being done in Dilbert-like cubicles is disappearing faster than the ozone layer and the newly freed beasts are stampeding out of the office gates and sniffing around for the nearest hotspot.

Yes, these frightening creatures, formerly known as simply employees, are now repositioned as free range information workers. And they are running amok, accessing networks remotely and gleefully sharing sensitive company information from their favorite cushy chair at Starbucks.

Today, being an information worker is all about communicating with anybody, anywhere, anytime and in any way imaginable, by e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, phone, voicemail, cell or, I don’t know, carrier pigeon. As their personal lives and work lives become inextricably entwined, these spoiled brats of business make more and more of their diva-like demands on IT pros and developers.

Now, with the assistance of Voiceover Guy, I now provide you my carefully researched list of the top five most requested requests from information workers.

Number one.

VOICEOVER GUY: If it’s not too much trouble and you have time, I was wondering if you could possibly —

VOICEOVER GUY: I just want one identity and password for my desktop and laptop and Treo, PDA, gym locker and OnStar.

SAMANTHA BEE: You’re forgetting something.

VOICEOVER GUY: Oh, right. How hard can this be?

SAMANTHA BEE: OK, that’s more like it.

Number two.

VOICEOVER GUY: I hate sending e-mails and instant messages and calling and no one gets back to me. No matter where they are physically, I want to know in real time the online presence of everyone on my 50-person team. That way I can just communicate with those who will respond instantly or at least I’ll know they’re purposely ignoring me.

SAMANTHA BEE: Number three.

VOICEOVER GUY: I’m tired of having to bring into IT every laptop I ever want to use to connect remotely to the company network, like the one I use on my unsecured, non-firewalled home wireless network my teenage son’s delinquent friend manages for me. Can’t IT just lighten up on this? (Laughter.) I know it’s just me connecting to the network.

VOICEOVER GUY: I just want to collaborate with my five favorite outside vendors on our own project Web site. Give me a break; if I’m smart enough to pump my own gas, I think I can handle a self-service Web site.

SAMANTHA BEE: And those are the top five.

VOICEOVER GUY: Oh, and it would be great if you could find some way of saving me from myself with the rights management thingy.

SAMANTHA BEE: OK, I said five.

Now, in response to these requests and countless more, the standard response from IT pros and developers has been — (laughing) — “No!” And yet for years, IT pros and developers have been called upon to do the impossible and the demands of today’s information workers has become even more “impossibler”.

But the day is coming when a new surprising answer will spring forth from the lips of nearly all of you in this room, and that answer is “Yes” or at least, “That might be doable”.

And now back to Steve!

STEVE BALLMER: I think there was a little bit of exaggeration and hyperbole in Samantha’s comments but I do think we all resonate to some degree with the kinds of requests and interests that information workers have and are insisting on seeing from all of us as providers of IT infrastructure and solutions.

I’d like you to take a look at this video that was produced by Avanade. Avanade is both a partner of Microsoft and a very good customer, talking a little bit about the way they see this New World of Work and what it means for them to implement and provide the New World of Work to their own employees.

Roll the video, please.

(Video segment.)

STEVE BALLMER: Key concepts: A desire from the IT folks at Avanade to connect people and information and they need and want the tools that facilitate them delivering that connection, that connection to the new way of work to the information workers inside Avanade.

Continuous Innovation

Avanade is a particularly interesting case because the information workers inside Avanade are all actually IT professionals themselves out serving clients, and so they all live in both of these camps, as information workers looking for personal productivity, as IT professionals learning to enhance the productivity and connection between people and information in the customers that they serve.

I think the video and the folks at Avanade well articulated what all of our goal needs to be: to provide the infrastructure that really connects people and information and facilitates the new way of work.

We think the keys to that in some senses have to come out of a flywheel of activity in which all of us are engaged, delivering services to information workers, as information workers ourselves and as developers and IT pros.

It starts in some senses with the designing and building of applications. We’ve been working hard on our .NET infrastructure now for over five years, core infrastructure for developers to design and build the next generation of applications. I’m going to talk to you about some progress and some advances with .NET and the tools around .NET but we think we’ve come a long way, I missed the event we had last night for our regional directors but I hear it was awesome. These are folks who are working with .NET developers around the world. We thank you for your support and we know we’re going to continue to move forward this infrastructure to facilitate the designing and building of applications.

The next piece in some senses from an information technology perspective is to make sure that those applications can be deployed and operated. No information worker is going to engage in the New World of Work unless the applications are there available for them and up and running.

A few years ago, we set forth our Dynamic Systems Initiative, which was really a comprehensive priority and technical approach for Microsoft to move forward and not only build our management infrastructure but really to make sure that we connected closely to the designing and building of new applications.

We’re nearing an important milestone this year in DSI with our shipment later this year of Visual Studio 2005, which is the first release of Visual Studio that will actually connect the flywheels where you build the management information and instrumentation directly into every application you build.

Once those applications are deployed and operable, the key thing then is to connect them back to the information workers so they can interact with them and then act on the information. This is an area where we think we need more core infrastructure and I’m going to talk about that core infrastructure in no small measure today.

Part of that, of course, is end user oriented tools like Office and Outlook and others, but part of it is actually giving you the tools that let you connect people and information: search, directory, self-provisioning Web sites like SharePoint, so that end users can get involved in these processes with a controlled and managed infrastructure that gets delivered by the information technology folks around the world.

Enabling the New World of Work

We talk about this infrastructure for information workers supporting this New World of Work as essentially building on three core principles. First of all, you need to allow, you want to allow information workers to have access to the information that they want and need without compromise. We’re not naïve, we’re not silly; we know you cannot take undue risks with security, we know that there are challenges in connecting people mobily, we understand these issues. But our goal together has got to be to provide the infrastructure that facilitates information worker access without compromise to information.

Number two, more and more of this infrastructure has to be self-service. To the degree that every IT project, every request from an information worker involves direct engagement with information technology, there are going to be bottlenecks. We love some of the work that we’ve been doing and we’ve been doing with many of you to build out SharePoint Team Services as kind of a self-provisioning, self-service infrastructure for team collaboration in many environments. We think there’s still a long way to go, but we have work going on in business intelligence, in search, and application deployment so that more and more of what you provide instead of being point solutions can be infrastructure which then information workers can extend and provision themselves.

Third, we know you need management control over this access and this connection and so whatever we do in this area has to be deeply grounded in policy as a tool to give control to IT on the management of these systems.

The backbone of the tools, the infrastructure to connect people and information really comes out of presence information, identity information, rights management and network access. Who are the people on your network? What resources do they have access to? What information do they have access to? Who’s actually present and which people do they have access to? Those are foundation building blocks and frankly an area where we have a lot of investment: identity, presence, rights management and network access.

Many of you have explored and implemented our rights management server product. We’ve started to build out a presence configuration with some of the stuff that we’ve been doing around Live Communication Server. We’ll bring more Network Access Protection in the new Windows Longhorn Server, which comes after the “Longhorn” client next year.

Anchoring in Active Directory

But probably the heart and soul of what we’ve done so far and where we have still a very rich and comprehensive roadmap actually comes from Active Directory itself. It somehow is a foundation building block because it’s Active Directory that really maintains the identity of all this information workers that you’re trying to serve, who are they, and gives you a framework for starting to set up what rights and what permissions do they have to access the network, to access information, to distribute information, to share it.

We’ve been very successful with Active Directory and it took a long time. When we first brought Active Directory to market, frankly you were slow to adopt it. You said, “You have a lot of work to do, Microsoft; good idea, good concept, go back to work, go back to work, go back to work, go back to work.”

So we’ve been investing now for a number of years in improving and enhancing Active Directory, making it simpler to set up, simpler to deploy, simpler to take care of. Active Directory is the tool for single sign-on, Active Directory is the tool that allows you to administer your networks and put policy really to work for you, Active Directory is the foundation for identity and advanced identity techniques, smart cards, two factor authentication, Active Directory is the backbone for determining who gets access to the network and when.

Today, there are over a thousand applications from various vendors that are now exploitive of Active Directory, they use the identity information in Active Directory in very rich ways so that you get one concept of identity whether you’re using Exchange and Windows Server or a variety of third party applications.

We’re investing in something we call Active Directory Federation Services to make it easier to take identities in your company and another company and have those be somehow respected and trusted across company borders. Those technologies will ship as part of Windows Server 2003 Release 2 within the next 12 months.

And with the work that we’ve been doing with IBM and Sun and others, we’re extending our sense of identity to other systems through the Web services protocol standard. Scott McNealy, now my best friend — (laughter) — and I were up on stage — all right, I took a little bit of poetic license — but we were up on stage a couple of weeks ago showing interoperability between identities in the Sun system, in the Liberty systems and in Active Directory systems using the Web Services protocols as a foundation.

You can see here some of the statistics about directory usage in large enterprises: 86 percent of large enterprises now use Active Directory. The No. 2 most popular directory in use is actually our own NT 4 domain, Netware, E-Directory, LDAP, Samba and you can see a number of the others. This is a very important core infrastructure service for provisioning applications that really facilitate this New World of Work.

Windows Server: Platform for Today and Tomorrow

The carrier for Active Directory is Windows Server. The carrier for DSI in some large measure is Windows Server. The carrier for our .NET technology is Windows Server. So in some senses it’s important for you to understand where we are and what we’re trying to do with Windows Server. It is the number one server operating system on the market with close to 65 percent market share.

We’ve done a lot of work in Windows Server to go back and optimize its capabilities by workload. We want to be the best at directory, the best at network access, the best at file sharing, the best at collaboration, the best at e-mail, the best at business applications and database, the best at Web-service applications, the best for computational clusters. In most of these cases today, I’d argue not only are we No. 1, but we have absolutely by far the best product on the marketplace. And certainly for all applications that are about connecting information workers to information, I think that is incontrovertible.

But we continue to invest in this product, both to take it forward to support new hardware, as well as investing in new scenarios where we still have, if you will, improvements to make and market share to gain.

This year we’ve brought the 64-bit version of the server to market, we’re starting the process of supporting multi-core, we took care of at least the licensing ramifications of that earlier this year and I announced about a month or so ago that we’ll be building virtualization capabilities over the next couple of years into the Windows Server itself.

In the next 12 months, we’ll bring Release 2 of Windows Server 2003. It will bring better support for branch configuration, it brings Active Directory Federation Services and a variety of storage improvements, quotas and some other SANs management improvements that you’ve all been asking for.

Also within the next 12 months, we’ll bring out a special version of Windows Server that really is optimized for computational clusters, the kinds of things that you find in the oil industry for geological analysis or the car industry for crash simulation. The capabilities here will include a distributed task schedule that lets you move jobs around and schedule them on any system in the cluster.

So a lot of work going on to continue to improve the core foundation, Active Directory but all of the other pieces in Windows Server, No. 1, dedicated to not only keeping this product number one but to continue to improve it in every way for every server workload so that you can know without hesitation no matter what you’re trying to do, the skills that you’ve built around Windows Server, it’s the right tool for almost every job in the information technology industry.

Direct Mobile Messaging

We’re announcing today also another set of products that are designed to help connect people to information, a set of enhancements to Exchange and our Windows Mobile product for the Windows Mobile phones and Windows Mobile PDAs that we have in the market. Directly these things are called Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 and the Messaging and Security Feature Pack for Windows Mobile 5.

Some people say Microsoft is a good marketing company; I have a hard time saying all that. But those two products will release later this year, and what they do together is really allow for the kind of direct mobile messaging that all of you want. You put them on a Windows Mobile device, you upgrade your Exchange Server to 2003 Service Pack 2 and instantly out of the box you get always up to date push e-mail, the kind that we have not delivered and RIM has historically delivered.

But you also get that with no additional management costs. It’s just a built-in feature of Exchange. It’s enabled by Active Directory. We give you the ability to control policies on those mobile devices. If somebody loses one, you can automatically wipe it and clean it. All of it will be included with Exchange so there’s no additional licensing costs for this infrastructure. And there will be devices running Windows Mobile available from over 40 different manufacturers this year alone.

All of this is about again enabling the New World of Work, connecting people and information and deeply anchored in the identity information in Active Directory.

To show you a little bit what this looks like, I’d like to invite on stage with me Mike Hall, who’s technical product manager in the Microsoft Mobile & Embedded [Devices] group. Please welcome Mike Hall. (Applause.)

MIKE HALL: Hi, Steve.

STEVE BALLMER: Hey, Mike.

MIKE HALL: Hi, everybody.

STEVE BALLMER: What’s this?

MIKE HALL: Well, Steve, this is the ThinkPad X41 Tablet from Lenovo. This has just been announced today.

STEVE BALLMER: The ThinkPad Tablet from Lenovo?

MIKE HALL: This combines everything you love about ThinkPads and everything you love about Tablet PC in one device.

STEVE BALLMER: Well, that’s pretty exciting. I’ve been waiting for a ThinkPad that was tablet form factor and I know a lot of other folks have, too.

MIKE HALL: Absolutely. But this thing gives you six hours of battery life, full size keyboard and integrated biometric fingerprint reader. This thing has only been announced today, so perhaps even you might be able to get one real soon.

STEVE BALLMER: Maybe I’ll keep this one. (Laughter.) This doesn’t have much to do with mobile messaging to PDAs but it sure made my day. I’m going to go play with it for a minute backstage and I’ll let Mike show you the rest.

MIKE HALL: OK, thanks.

So before we get into the demo itself, what I’d like to do is show you a short video that will show you clearly how a combination of Windows Mobile 5.0, with the messaging and security feature packs and Exchange Server 2003 SP 2 gives you the ability to remotely manage and secure your Windows Mobile devices in the enterprise.

Let’s roll the video.

(Video segment.)

MIKE HALL: Okay, so what we’ve just seen in the video is how a combination of Windows Mobile 5.0 and the Messaging and Security Feature Pack and Exchange Server 2003 SP 2 can be combined to manage your devices and secure your devices and also remotely wipe your devices, if needed.

So let’s walk through a scenario of getting a device and getting that configured and ready to go out.

Oh, on my desktop it looks like I’m getting a totally unexpected voice over IP call. Let me just take that. And this is from Sharon. Sharon is Steve the CEO’s admin.

Hey, Sharon, what’s up?

SHARON: Hey, Mike, you’re never going to believe this one but Steve the CEO lost his Windows Mobile device again. He’s on site with a customer right now and can’t get access to the corporate network, but really, really needs access to mail. Any chance you can get a new device set up for him and sent over ASAP?

MIKE HALL: Sure. If you can IM me the address, then I’ll get a device configured and sent out to him right now.

SHARON: You bet. I’ll send right now.

MIKE HALL: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, very good.

OK, so I’ve been so busy reconfiguring devices for Steve the CEO and various other people that I can’t remember where I saw some information, either on e-mail or in a document that told me that I needed to modify the Exchange Server security settings for my Windows Mobile device.

So what I’m going to use here is Windows Desktop Search and the MSN toolbar to search for that information. So down on my toolbar I’m just going to start typing P-O-L for policy and you can see that I get a filtered list of content giving me e-mail, Word documents and even PDF files. Desktop search is extensible through a plug-in SDK that gives you the ability to plug in your own search items.

So what I’m going to do is just open up the desktop search application and you can see that not only do I get the list of items that were in that initial search but I also get a preview on the right hand side of the screen and in this case this is an e-mail from Gina Jorgensen, our Chief Software Officer, telling me that I need to modify my Exchange Server SP 2 settings to only allow three attempts at logon to a Windows Mobile device before the device wipes itself clean.

Okay, so let’s roll forward into 2006 and see much the same experience in “Longhorn.” So in this case I’m on the “Longhorn” desktop, I’m just going to click on Start and open up the documents folder. Now, you can see that in the documents folder there are over 405 individual documents, so finding exactly the document that I need to find that deals with policy can, of course, be an interesting experience.

But with “Longhorn” it’s not so much about search, it’s about how you visualize the information that you’re looking for inside the “Longhorn” operating system. So, for example, you can see that all of these documents are authored by a number of people, Cicero and so on. What I’m going to do is just drop down the author list and select Cicero as the author and allow the contents to be filtered. And you can see from 405 items I’m now down to just 45 items.

If I now step onto keywords and stack by keywords, you can see there are a number of different keywords listed, including policy. If I double-click on policy, again I get a filtered list of content that gives me just 12 items.

Now, perhaps even that isn’t good enough to find the item that I’m looking for. So what I can do now is just zoom the icon view to give me a direct view into the documents to find exactly what I’m looking for at that time.

Okay, so that’s taking a look at the “Longhorn” experience. Why don’t we now go back and configure the Exchange Server so that we’re ready to configure this Windows Mobile device.

So right now I’m looking at the Exchange System Manager. You can see that I have an item here for mobile services. I’m going to right-click and select Properties, select Device Security.

Now, one of the great things here is that through policy enforcement I know that all the settings that I’m applying here are going to be available on every Windows Mobile device throughout my enterprise.

So I can do a number of things. I can enforce a password on every device. How many people do you know have got a PDA or mobile device of some kind that don’t have any kind of security on it? They hate the security, it takes too long to get into the unit.

In this case, I can secure the unit and know that all of the personal information and all of the sensitive corporate data is secured on the device through not only a password, I can set the minimum password length, I can require alpha numeric and I can even local lock the device after so many minutes of inactivity so if somebody leaves their device in the back of a cab or just leaves it on their desk, after one minute the device will lock.

At the moment you can see that I’m currently locally wiping the device after five local logon attempts, so I’m just going to modify this down to three. And you can see that I’m pushing out policy updates to Windows Mobile devices every 24 hours.

So the settings here are complete, I click on OK and OK, and that’s my work on the Exchange Server complete.

Now let’s go and take a look at the Windows Mobile device and how that works.

So this is a new device from Symbol. This is the Symbol MC50 and this is running Windows Mobile 5.0 with the Messaging and Security Feature Pack already loaded on the device.

Now, many of you have probably used Outlook Web Access to gain access to your e-mail when you’re out of the office and, of course, Outlook Web Access requires that you know the server address as well as your credentials, the user name, password and domain.

Configuring a Windows Mobile 5.0 device to get onto the network to get your e-mail and to get the security policies applied onto the device is as simple as getting onto Outlook Web Access.

So at the moment, active synch is already running, I’m not connected to a PC, this is over the air configuration. So I’m going to select Menu and Add Server Source. You can see that to save time I’ve already filled in the server name, which is Contoso.com. I’m moving on to the next page and in this case I’ve already filled in the username, CEO, that’s Steve, the password and the domain name.

So what I’m going to do now is just hit Next, I want all of my information: contacts, calendar, e-mail and tasks.

So at this point I hit Finish, and ActiveSync at that point will make its connection out to the Exchange Server and the Exchange Server will start pushing through direct push e-mail down onto the Windows Mobile device.

But you can see not only am I getting my e-mail, I’m also getting the security policy notification directly on the Windows Mobile device as well. This is saying that the server I’m connecting to requires policy to be enforced on this system.

So I’m going to click Okay and you can see that the policy change requires that I update my password on the system as well.

So I click Okay here and this is now asking for a numeric password. So I’m just going to put in 6421, 6421, click on Okay and then at that point e-mail, contacts, calendar and tasks all start being pushed down to the Windows Mobile device, including attachments and meeting requests and so on.

So at this point, you can see that I have 18 unread e-mails. I click Hide, I click Start and Messaging and that takes me into my e-mail inbox, so all of my mails, all of my contacts, calendar, my attachments are all here.

Now, if I leave the device for one minute, this will lock. Obviously we don’t want to just stand here for a minute, so what I’m going to do is pull up a second Symbol MC50 device, which has been just sitting on the side here and this is already when I switch it on prompting for password.

So if I put in the password here and I’m going to use the wrong password, this tells me that the password I entered was incorrect and I need to retry. So I’ve now entered the password incorrectly twice and it’s now saying all information on the device will erase under the next unsuccessful password attempt. So I put in the password again and bam, that’s it, the device is now locally wiped. All information on the system is gone. All of my personal data, all of my sensitive corporate data, my e-mail, my contacts, my calendar, all of my local files are all wiped from the device so, in effect, this is just like taking a new device straight out of the box, nobody has access to the information that was on there now.

OK, so I have configured one device which needs to go to Steve, our CEO. And, of course, he’s at One Microsoft Way in Redmond, Washington. What I need to do, of course, is find Steve. So now let me give you a preview of a technology that has been worked on by the MapPoint business unit at Microsoft, which is called Virtual Earth. Now, this is pretty cool. At the moment, I’m looking at downtown Seattle and this is a completely Web-based application. I can move map around on the screen, I can zoom in and out using the mouse and I can jump across to certain areas of the map such as One Microsoft Way.

OK, here we are. One thing that you’ll notice here is that on the right hand side of the screen I have a scratchpad that shows me the location that I’ve jumped to. Now, of course, just having a map is fine but perhaps what I want to do is get an aerial view of that same map. So we go into an aerial view and again I can move this around inside of the browser. But even better than that is the hybrid view that overlays the map view and the aerial view together.

Now, once I’ve delivered my Windows Mobile, the Symbol MC50 device to Steve, the CEO, I think it’s only proper that I treat myself to a Starbucks grande vanilla latte and a slice of lemon pound cake. So what I’m going to do here inside of Virtual Earth is just do a search for Starbucks, hit return, we do a search. You can see on the map here that all the local Starbucks are listed and one of them is pretty close to Microsoft. So I’ll just add this to my scratchpad and the great thing about the scratchpad is that I can use this to e-mail my friends the addresses, the locations and contact information for places in the scratchpad or I can directly blog this out to an MSN Space.

So I know where Steve is, I know where the nearest Starbucks is, so at the moment I’m all set.

So during the last few minutes we’ve seen a number of things. We’ve seen how a combination of Windows Mobile 5.0 with the Security and Messaging Feature Pack and Exchange Server 2003 SP 2 give me the ability to remotely manage and secure the Windows Mobile devices used by my enterprise, and we’ve also seen how a number of different technologies, including Office Communicator, Virtual Earth and also the combination of Exchange Server settings give me the ability to not only work collaboratively with all of the people inside of my company but also people outside of the company and to find the things that interest me quickly and easily.

Thanks very much. (Applause.)

VOICEOVER GUY: And now a special interview segment with Samantha Bee.

SAMANTHA BEE: Hi. We are back.

Now, my guest today is Dr. Ken, a specialist in IT pro developer mediation techniques. Thanks so much for coming in, Dr.

DR. KEN: It’s good to be here, thank you.

SAMANTHA BEE: Now, tell us about what you do.

DR. KEN: Well, you would think that IT pros and developers would be staunch allies first in supporting users and the business and second, of course, in keeping the IT budget from getting cut, but surprisingly that’s not always the case.

SAMANTHA BEE: Okay, that is surprising. So how can they be motivated to work together more effectively?

DR. KEN: Well, the Microsoft approach is to inspire them with demos on coming things like upgrade distribution and “Longhorn,” but I prefer mediation to help developers and IT pros achieve a breakthrough with their conflict.

SAMANTHA BEE: And how do you do that?

DR. KEN: Hand puppets. (Laughter.)

SAMANTHA BEE: Really?

DR. KEN: Yes. This guy here is my IT pro puppet Carl and here is my developer puppet Carla. So why don’t you go ahead and you be the developer there and I’ll be the IT pro, so we just put these guys on.

Now we can have a safe, meaningful dialogue that teaches IT pros and developers to reach accommodation.

SAMANTHA BEE: Okay, well, I think we’re all anxious to see that.

DR. KEN: Okay, here we go. Now, we’ll have the IT pro start by sharing a typical issue.

SAMANTHA BEE: All right.

DR. KEN: Carl, my biggest challenge is deploying the systems that you build. If your new app doesn’t work, the users yell at me. And the developer would reply — go ahead, just share whatever the developer would say.

SAMANTHA BEE: OK. Um, what do you expect me to do about it, Carl? My part is done. (Laughter, applause.) So, I don’t know, how do you resolve that?

DR. KEN: Well, the secret is to let the puppets work it out between themselves, so let’s see how they do.

SAMANTHA BEE: OK, OK.

DR. KEN: I have to make your apps actually work on different operating systems and different platforms. I don’t think you get how difficult that is.

SAMANTHA BEE: What I get is that you’re complaining again. Look, I bust my butt to build these apps and then you can’t even get them up and running. How hard can that be?

DR. KEN: Oh, please now you sound like an information worker. As long as you’re doing impersonations, how about if I do some of developers like you?

SAMANTHA BEE: Oh sure, let’s hear ’em.

DR. KEN: OK. Hey, the app compiled so isn’t that testing enough for you? Oh, what do you need documentation for; if you have a question, find me and ask. (Laughter.)

DR. KEN: Yeah, maybe if you didn’t suck up the entire IT budget, I would.

SAMANTHA BEE: OK, Dr., Dr., Dr., give me the puppet.

DR. KEN: Sorry.

SAMANTHA BEE: Bad doctor. (Laughter.)

Now, moderation is, yes, correct. Mediation is, of course, nice but I think if IT pros and developers really want to experience a breakthrough we should just let them see some Microsoft demos. So I’m going to temporarily turn things back over to Steve Ballmer but after he’s done, don’t go away, because I will have the final word. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: It’s our conference, I get the final word, I swear!

World wide .NET Momentum

I hope you have a little bit of a sense now not only of how we see this notion of connecting people and information, but also a little bit hopefully in a humorous way of some of the issues that we know you’re facing every day as developers and IT pros.

I want to turn to that next and talk a little bit about where we are and some things we have coming for developers and for folks who are involved in managing and securing these networks.

I’ve got to start with .NET. We’ve been in market now five years with .NET. The primary development tool of choice for 43 percent of all developers is .NET based. Java is No. 2 at 35 percent. And frankly, Win32 non-.NET is No. 3. So there’s really been an embrace amongst developers for .NET. I know we still have some in the audience who are VB 6 users. I tend to get e-mail from you fairly regularly. We’re working hard to continue in our next version of Visual Studio to make your life better, please bear with us, we know these innovations will be absolutely worth the wait when we can get you there.

SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, BizTalk Server 2005

This is a big year for .NET because we take it to the next level with three important products: the next version of SQL Server 2005, which has the .NET runtime embedded as a piece of the database; Visual Studio 2005, which introduces .NET version 2.0 and adds a whole set of high-end lifecycle development tools; and the BizTalk Server 2006, which from a workflow and orchestration perspective takes again .NET to the next level.

So it’s a big important year for .NET. We think we’re ahead in terms of connected systems and interoperability where J2EE is. We’re going to just keep pushing that advantage that we talked to you about. We add the lifecycle development tools. This is a year where I’ll say, “Watch out, Rational,” because I think we have some big breakthroughs.

This is a year where we take SQL Server again up to the next level so that absolutely, positively the most demanding applications you’ll feel comfortable putting on SQL Server. We have over 50 percent unit share with SQL Server today and we think we can just keep ramping that up.

And last but not least, we’ve done a lot of work in the runtime and in the tools to make sure that we have great tools for lightweight Web-app development, and you see that with some of the Web-design tools we’ve already brought to market, we’ll finish that work in Visual Studio 2005. So whether you’re doing lightweight development for hosting and a shared hosting site on up, we think with this combination, this winning combination, we take the .NET advantage really up to the next level here in the course of the next year.

Let me just give you one data point today about .NET 2.0. We took this new Sun Microsystems’s benchmark, they call it WS Test 1.1. And we ran IBM WebSphere against it, we ran applications built on .NET 1.1 and we ran applications on .NET 2.0 beta 2. We’re 25 to 40 percent faster running that application, 25 to 40 percent faster than .NET 1.1 and we’re up to 200 percent better than IBM WebSphere. The speed of application development and the speed of the developed applications are really dramatically improved with this next release of .NET.

I want to give you a little bit of a sense of some of the kinds of things we hope you’ll do using .NET to connect people and information, particularly through Microsoft Office, and in order to do that I’d like to invite BJ Holtgrewe up on stage. BJ is going to show you a little bit of how you can connect people and information by building around .NET.

Hey, BJ

BJ Holtgrewe: Good morning, Steve.

So I’m going to start out here with something that looks extremely confusing, but this is today’s world for an information worker. If you look at the typical desktop today, you’ll notice that I’ve got a number of different applications and it’s not that they’re all not mission-critical. I’ve got Outlook here, of course, I’ve got a browser so I can do some searching, I’ve got a tracking system so I can track deliveries to my customers, and I have a mission critical CRM application.

The fundamental problem is that we require our end users today to switch back and forth between these applications, cutting and pasting, and basically trying to figure out how to merge all of this contextually together.

Let’s switch over to my laptop and let’s take a look at a new approach.

Now, when we start out here, you’ll notice that we’re in Outlook and it looks like typical Outlook 2003 and it is. But what I’ve done here with Outlook is using the new Outlook add-in support provided by Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System — say that three times — we’ve customized out this application and pulled all the data together into one location in a command center, if you will.

What’s cool is this is not VBA, this is Visual Studio 2005 so it’s C#, it’s VB, it’s Windows forms, it’s managed controls, it’s XML Web services, and it’s all the power of Visual Studio being applied right to the Office application.

So let’s dig in and see about this customization. Now, you’re going to notice that, gee, I’ve got 555 e-mails in this inbox; that’s typical to a lot of our end users out there. They’re unread right now; gee, I’ve got 2,000 total e-mails. Let’s go in and see how we can dive in a little deeper.

You’ll notice that we’ve added a CRM menu up here that has a list of a number of things that are Outlook related but also things that are related to the other applications. We go over to the folders and I have a CRM today folder, accounts, appointments, contacts, opportunities, scorecards. What does Outlook know about accounts and opportunities and scorecards? Well, let’s see if we can dig deeper and see.

I’m going to check the CRM today view and the first thing you’re going to notice is I have managed controls, a grid and a tab control placed right on this page. Now, I have my list of accounts coming from an XML Web service from my CRM application. Notice they’re color coded red, yellow and green. Let’s see how that happens. If you go over to this scorecard on the right hand side, this is a new technology called [code-named] “Maestro,” which is part of the Office System, and “Maestro” allows you to go in and get insight on both your customers and the data and in this case we set up a scorecard that allows us to know the health of the customer.

Now, I’ve got a couple of things; on-time delivery is red, retaining existing customers is red. Let’s double-click on this and see what happens.

Now, you’ll notice a window is popped up and SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services has been launched and I’m now getting a report, but this just isn’t any old report, this is a report connected to that customer Contoso. And I can see I’ve got a number of contracts that are pending that probably are not going to get renewed.

Now, that alerts me a little and so I need to dive in a little deeper. So I’m going to go over to the accounts view and you’re going to notice in the accounts view that again I have my accounts there in a grid but I also have account of the e-mails, appointments, contacts, tasks and notes showing up. How did that happen? Let’s even look and see what happened down below. Notice that from my CRM application I now have all of my opportunities for Contoso. With a click of the button to the documents tab I now am looking into SharePoint and I’m seeing all my Word and all my Excel documents. By the way, which were also created with Visual Studio Tools for Office that are connected to Contoso. Another click, contextually I now have gotten my shipping, so I know what’s being delivered to this customer, and I’m even getting the current news on Contoso pumped in here.

But here’s where I get really excited, here’s where the crossover happens. I have the specific e-mails, appointments, contacts, tasks and notes only for Contoso. With Visual Studio Tools for Office we’re actually going in and using the object model of Outlook.

So let’s open up this e-mail that says Notice of Intent to Terminate. Okay, I read the e-mail here. Michael Graf is going to cancel his account because he’s not too happy. Typically, what would I do with this e-mail? Well, I would probably forward it to an alias or send it to all my team members because I’m not the one who needs to act on this. But what happens? They’re dealing with 500, 600 e-mails also and so I get stuck in their queue somewhere. Where I really want to move this is over to my CRM application.

So again using VSTO we added a button that says Opportunity, add e-mail to existing opportunity and now contextually I see Contoso, all of the opportunities there and I can add the e-mail there.

Now, the last thing I want to show you I get very excited about. Outlook is really cool because I can unplug my laptop, I can get on the road and I’m a road warrior many times using this and so how do I take this data with me.

Well, Outlook knows how to synch but my developer built this solution so that they could use SQL Server Express and pull down my tracking data, my documents and my CRR system and pull it down.

So that is Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft system and the Outlook add-in support. What do you think? (Applause.)

Great!

Let’s take a quick look at a video here then that is a couple of customers that we’ve been working with over the last two months out of about 100 customers that have been working with this and get a view of what they’re doing with this technology.

(Video segment.)

Architected Interoperability

STEVE BALLMER: I think you get a sense of some of the fantastic things that you can do to connect people and information using .NET and Office. That’s only going to get better as we release next year the next version of Microsoft Office, codenamed “[Office] 12.” We’re going to adopt XML formats as the default for Office, which will allow for better compatibility, better file format but most importantly better ability for you to integrate Office applications and Office documents into your line of business applications. And this is just part of our general commitment to XML Web services integration throughout our product line.

Making DSI Real

The last piece of this puzzle is really all about deployment and operations, it’s about management, it’s about the Dynamic Systems Initiative. Dynamic Systems Initiative at its core was about two things, number one, getting serious about management and number two, making sure that we allowed the developer to express knowledge about the application and the model for managing it directly in the created application.

With Visual Studio 2005, we’re going to deliver the System Definition Model, SDM, at the core and the next wave of our management product, System Center, both SMS, the deployment product, and MOM, the operations product, will support SDM, consume them as output through applications that you write using Visual Studio 2005.

As Forrester says now, with MOM 2005 in the market and gaining momentum, does Microsoft strategy look solid going forward? In fact, it does. This is another area where the perseverance and commitment to innovation over a long period of time I think has been important for us really serving the needs that you have as people looking to address business issues and we’re very, very committed to it.

We’re going to give you just a brief demonstration of some of these management technologies. Bill Anderson from our Windows Management team is going to come on stage and join me and then I’ll come on back and kind of wrap up. Bill Anderson. (Applause.) Welcome, Bill.

BILL ANDERSON: Thanks, Steve, appreciate it.

STEVE BALLMER: What have you got for us today?

BILL ANDERSON: A lot of stuff for you today. As you indicated, Steve, a lot of investments from us in the area of manageability, specifically using Web services as a component of that. So we’re going to talk a little bit today about how some of the partnerships with ourselves, our great partners at Sun, Intel and others have been investing in —

STEVE BALLMER: Sun?

BILL ANDERSON: Sun, your friend Scott McNealy donated some of this stuff over here that we’re going to play with in a little bit.

STEVE BALLMER: You mean this Sun box right here?

BILL ANDERSON: Yep. We’ll take a look at that in just a second. How we’re using Web Services — (knock, knock, knock). (Laughter.)

STEVE BALLMER: I was gentle. Go ahead.

BILL ANDERSON: How we’re using Web services as a way to do systems management.

So we’re hoping using Web services or what we call WS-Management can bring you guys a couple of base level benefits. First of all, by using Web services it enables management outside of our corporate intranet in a whole lot easier way.

Second of all, with the investments we’re making inside of Windows to expose manageability data through Web services, it almost allows you to have agent-less management experience on the Windows platform.

And finally, with these key hardware partners, we’re enabling management at the hardware level, so even if you don’t have an operating system present, you can still get some manageability.

So let’s take a look at some of the hardware we’ve got set up over here to walk through today. And we have Steve’s favorite Sun rack over here. This Sun rack has got three servers in it. See where those servers are running Solaris? One of those servers, Steve, is running a Windows Server on it.

STEVE BALLMER: A Windows Server in a Sun rack running on a Sun box?

BILL ANDERSON: Absolutely.

STEVE BALLMER: You’re my man, my man. (Laughter.)

BILL ANDERSON: And on that Windows Server we also have MOM set up, MOM 2005, which is going to be my management console for the majority of the demo.

STEVE BALLMER: MOM managing?

BILL ANDERSON: MOM managing a lot of this that’s up here. We’re going to manage a whole bunch of things. He’s giving way the punch line already.

As part of this, Sun is going to be taking their service processor and exposing this Web services management for you the way we’re doing today in 2006 and they’re also investing very heavily in their application and operating system stack as well when it comes to Web Services.

The other device that you’re casually leaning on is a desktop unit from Intel using their Active Management Technology. This is a prototype unit as well and Intel is going to be enabling their AMT technologies and Web services in the upcoming iterations as well.

But by using the Sun and the Intel hardware, as well as the software within Windows, we’re going to do a couple of base level demonstrations today on how WS-Management can help.

So the first scenario, I’m a corporate IT guy managing a financial services company using a tool like MOM to manage my enterprise. Now, most of the time we think of servers being this mission critical thing but for me my trader workstations are equally as important for me, down time can cost me losses of millions of dollars in revenue and transactions. As you guys look at your outside screens, this is my trader workstation here. This is actually running on this Intel AMC box.

So now what we’ve done now, because these are so important, is we’ve invested heavily in manageability. Not only are they running on the Intel AMC system but they’re also actually using things like MOM to be managed Windows XP SP 2 and a series of parallel backup drives just in case — yeah, as you just saw on the outside screen, just in case we get some kind of critical system failure.

If you take a look on the outside screens, what’s happened is we’ve had a power outage on our trader floor, which could cost us a lot of money. So the power comes back up, the systems are actually going to go ahead and reboot. But unfortunately, I think what you’re going to see in a few minutes is that they boot and they fail because they can’t actually find a boot device.

So what I’m going to do is use WS-Management through MOM to actually go restart and reboot that system to the appropriate drive.

So if I take a look at my MOM console, in fact, it’s already gone red on me to indicate that this machine is now down. There’s a couple of base things that I’m going to do here. The first thing, I have to restore service. What I’m doing is using the tasks inside of MOM to automate WS-Management tasks. In this case, I’m remotely connecting up to the hardware here, I’m forcing it to restart and I’m changing the boot order so it actually boots to the backup drive. This is going to get the user out of their problem and get them moving forward and get service restored.

Now, most of the time that’s the most important thing we’re focused on. However, we also have to go fix this failed drive now because as part of the power outage we’ve corrupted the front half of the drive. Normally, I’d have a tool like SMS that would have inventory and I’d go pull the inventory out so the tech knows what he needs to order. In this case, I’m actually going to use WS-Management as well to get me a quick system inventory so I can hand it off to the technician. Again, I’m going to go ahead and select this device, I’m going to automate a task that’s going to give me system inventory output. And you’ll notice as it scrolls through — we’ll give it a second to finish up — it even gives me all the detailed information as far as disk information: model number, serial number, et cetera, so I can hand this to a technician to go fix and solve this particular problem.

So now by using Web services management or WS-Management we’ve been able to remotely go off and manage this Windows PC, restore service and help troubleshoot it.

But I know what you guys are thinking out there and you’re probably thinking as well; sure, Microsoft, it’s easy for you to show how you can manage a Windows device, but you promised this cross-platform, heterogeneous story, so how can we maybe manage something a little different like a Solaris system possibly.

STEVE BALLMER: Really?

BILL ANDERSON: Absolutely, a Solaris system.

So what I’m going to do as part of this second demonstration is I’m not longer maybe corporate IT, I’m actually using Web services to outsource manage a small business. This small business runs a line of business application on Solaris that’s pretty critical to them. I have another tiny challenge with this small business though; they have a reasonably active CEO who likes to fuss around in my datacenter every once in a while and mix things up a little bit.

So what I’m going to have Steve do is play my CEO and, Steve, I need you to do me a favor.

STEVE BALLMER: What can I do for you?

BILL ANDERSON: I need you to go over to that Sun rack and pull a fan out. (Laughter.)

BILL ANDERSON: So Steve has removed a fan from the Sun box. At this point in time, the CEO has gone into the datacenter and, Houston, we have a problem. He’s removed the fan. For those of you who are up close, you can probably actually hear it, the rest of the fans have sped up to kind of compensate for what’s going on.

What I’m going to do is going to go ahead and refresh my MOM window, it’s going to go out through WS-Management, remotely collect that information and come back and give me an update on the status on my system.

STEVE BALLMER: It’s getting pretty noisy over here.

BILL ANDERSON: It is noisy and MOM has actually just indicated for us that we’ve got a warning. It’s not critical yet, it’s just a warning that we would probably want to go dig into.

Now, one of the things about Web Services Management that’s so nice is I can actually separate hardware health from software health. So what I’m going to do is go into my state view inside of MOM and it’s going to show me that, sure enough, my warning message is hardware related, not software related. And if I go ahead and double-click, it’s going to give me the details of the alert that’s been generated. So not only is WS-Management telling me something is wrong but even if I look down below under description, it’s telling me this is a fan related issue, there’s a fan that has actually gone ahead and failed.

Steve, pull another fan.

STEVE BALLMER: Really?

BILL ANDERSON: Pull a second fan.

STEVE BALLMER: All right.

BILL ANDERSON: I told you the CEO in this office —

STEVE BALLMER: We’ll see how good this Sun-Microsoft partnership is right now.

BILL ANDERSON: So Steve has actually at this point in time removed the second fan. Now, again, for those of you who are close, in a few seconds you’re going to hear this rev up like a jet engine up here while the rest of the fans are trying to compensate for it.

All the while, what we want to do is make sure we’re using tools like MOM to continue to monitor the health of the system. I’m just going to go back into my topology view in MOM, it’s going to go repaint my topology, refresh the data from this system and by now it’s probably going to tell me that this is much worse than just an informational problem. This is actually a critical error that’s gone off at this point.

Now, not only could the hardware be at risk but Steve, who’s in the office, might be at risk if this thing catches on fire. So what I want to be able to do —

STEVE BALLMER: Let’s do something with that one, OK?

BILL ANDERSON: So what I want to be able to do is actually remotely shut down that Sun server and bring up the backup server so that we don’t interrupt service to our line of business users.

Interestingly enough, this happens all the time, so I have an automated task to be able to do that. So I’m going to choose, failover to backup. At this point in time, on your outside screens what you’ll see is the main Solaris box actually go ahead and shut down, you’ll see that picture-in-picture window is going to go black for a second, actually bring it back up and it’s going to restore the backup Solaris system so my users aren’t interrupted and Steve stays safe.

But using Web Services Management we hope that we can allow you to manage your disparate systems together, use tools like SMS and MOM to manage them all in a single, integrated way and reduce your cost of doing ops.

Thanks, Steve.

STEVE BALLMER: Thanks, Bill.

BILL ANDERSON: Take care. (Applause.)

STEVE BALLMER: We have a little fun up here but I think it is really important to understand the agreement we put in place with Sun a year ago is a meaningful agreement to both companies as we try to push forward to give you the kind of interoperability that you really want in the datacenter.

Security Focus Yielding Results

The last topic I want to touch on, because it is essential to this notion of connecting people and information in the New World of Work, is security. We have really made security job one over the last three or four years. When Samantha was up here and she talked about security, that’s when I noticed the crowd buzzed most with interest. And we still have security absolutely as job one because we know that if we don’t do the right job of security, this whole notion of connecting people and information will become less relevant, as the threats and issues with security predominate.

I want to give you a little bit of an update on that. On the left hand side of the screen, you can see server vulnerabilities year to date, high-level severity vulnerabilities and all others. We’re not happy with Windows Server 2003, but it’s a lot better frankly than any other release that we have ever made, one high severity vulnerability, 29 total vulnerabilities.

Just for reference sake we also show you the number for SuSE and for Red Hat 3 by contrast.

Even in the Web server role, which is the role that competitively I would say people most associate with Linux, Windows Server 2003, 33 total vulnerabilities, 19 others. And you can see similar numbers for Red Hat in its minimum configuration and Red Hat in its default configuration.

And with the improvements that we’ve made, we see patching costs of 13 to 14 percent less for Windows than Linux.

None of this is designed to tell you that our job is done, none of this is designed to tell you that we think we’re doing enough yet on security and whether it’s Service Pack 1 of Windows Server 2003, which we know is the highest quality release yet, whether it’s the work that we did in SP 2 on Windows, whether it’s the work that we have coming in Longhorn, whether it’s the work that we’ll do to augment our security product line with the acquisitions of GeCAD and Giant and Sybari in anti-virus and anti-spam technologies and anti-malware, you’ll see us continue to invest in security as a job one priority.

Microsoft Update

Today, as part of that, we’re pleased to announce something new called Microsoft Update. We’ve taken the concept of Windows Update and the patching that it facilitates and moved it up to a whole new level and made it appropriate not only for Microsoft Windows but for the entire Microsoft product line.

So up on our Web site, Microsoft.com, there’s a consumer site called Microsoft Update. It will provide automatic updates to consumer machines and other small business machines around the world.

But there’s also an update catalogue which affiliates and talks to systems that run in small, medium and large enterprises. The Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer will talk to the update catalogue and get new information so that as you use that tool it is smarter about the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

For those of you who use Windows Server update services for deployment of patches inside your organization, it too has been instrumented to talk to the Microsoft update catalogue.

And last but certainly not least, our Systems Management Server, for those of you who use that product for deployment and management in the largest organizations, it too can talk to the update catalogue and keep fresh with the latest updates and patches that you’ll need from across the entire Microsoft product line.

And we’ve consolidated down to supporting one update agent, the Windows Update agent, that works across these technologies, each of which is suited to a different class and size and complexity of customer.

So while we know your number one desire is for us to eliminate the need for all future patches, we’re working hard on that but we’re also working hard to make sure that you have the tools to reasonably and responsibly manage the security inside the organizations that you’re responsible for.

Innovation Commitment

We’ve got a lot of new technologies coming in the security area, you’ll hear more about those in some of breakouts and I want you to really have a chance to understand our full commitment to eliminating not only vulnerabilities themselves but helping you protect against vulnerabilities as we move forward.

I want to wrap up again with this wheel. We talked a little bit today about the New World of Work. I think Samantha was kind of funny in the way she presented some of the things that we know information workers are demanding from all of us. We are trying to provide those information workers and you as folks who serve them with the tools to enable business success. The development tools anchored in .NET and Visual Studio .NET, the management tools anchored in the Dynamic Systems Initiative and System Center, the productivity tools anchored in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows and Windows Mobile are the core building blocks for this foundation.

And we just continue to invest, invest, invest, invest in the innovations that will let you as developers and IT professionals really do what you want to do. The anchor point here is innovation. We are committed absolutely to making sure that you have the leading edge innovations that you need to be successful connecting people and information.

I want to thank you for your time not only with me this morning, I want to thank you for your time here at Tech-Ed but most importantly we have 11,000 of the most enthusiastic and the most critical Microsoft IT pro and developer users in the world here in Orlando and I want to thank you for your input, I want to thank you for your support, I want to tell you if you need me I’m SteveB@microsoft.com. I’d love to hear what’s on your minds. Have a great Tech-Ed, enjoy yourselves and we appreciate it.

Thanks very much! (Applause.)

VOICEOVER GUY: And now the final word with Samantha B. (Applause.)

SAMANTHA BEE: Thank you very much. Well, that is it for this edition of the Techie Show. I’d like to thank my guest, Steve Ballmer.

The final word is this: as Steve demonstrated to you today, the lives of developers and IT pros are actually getting better. Many of your most intense pain points are either solved or starting to go away and all it took was a few billion dollars worth of Microsoft research and development.

Message to Steve: My life has some pain points. Nothing that a couple of million dollars probably wouldn’t solve. I’m just putting it out there.

Well, I’ve had a lot of fun this morning and so much so that I’ve decided to come back tomorrow when my guest will be Paul Flessner. Paul is going to give you a deep dive into Connected Systems and connect all the dots to all of your needs, dreams, hopes and aspirations and all will truly be well forever more. And that is a promise from me, Samantha B.

So have a great day attending all 400 breakout sessions and enjoy that swag. See you tomorrow. (Applause.)